In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the lettered avenues forming Alphabet City formed a notoriously unsafe corner of town, run by drug pushers and gangsters. Most of this was brought to a halt with "Operation Pressure Point," a massive police campaign to clean up the area and make it a place where people would want to live. Crime is way down, the old buildings have been renovated and supplemented by ugly new ones, and today the streets have become the haunt of moneyed twenty-somethings and tourist youth. Go beyond Avenue C and you may get hassled, but - during the day at least - you're unlikely to be mugged, and avenues A, B and C have some of the coolest bars, cafés and stores in the city.
At the
NuYorican Poets Café
at 236 E 3rd St (tel 212/505-8183), you may catch some of the biggest stars of the spoken-word scene
.
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